Luxury Presence recently crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, a milestone fewer than 2 percent of venture-backed software companies ever reach. And the Austin-based company now serves more than 100,000 agents across nearly 20,000 real estate businesses.
The milestone comes on the heels of a $37 million funding round that closed in January 2026, led for the third time by Bessemer Venture Partners, and the launch of the new Presence Platform, which consolidates a real estate agent’s client-facing business into a single system.
Since the start of 2025, Luxury Presence has expanded its AI product and engineering teams by more than 300 percent and says it now ships new features five times faster than it did 12 months ago. Founded in 2016 by CEO Malte Kramer, the company has raised $89 million total from investors including Bessemer, Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff and real estate coach Tom Ferry.
Inman had the chance to catch up with Kramer recently, during which he described what’s driving Luxury Presence’s AI-fueled product push and where he thinks the industry is headed.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Inman: We wrote about your company recently and the milestone you hit with $100 million annual recurring revenue. Only 2 percent of VC-backed software companies ever reach that milestone, and you guys started about 10 years ago. When you started, did you believe you’d get there — or was this a surprise even for you?
Malte Kramer: Honestly, I didn’t really think about it. When I started, I just knew I wanted to build a successful company. I really liked real estate as an industry, and I did think it was large enough to build a very large business, but I wasn’t thinking 10 years ahead. It was really just: Can I build a product that people find useful, find product-market fit and get my first few customers? That was the main focus in the beginning.
Once we raised our first round of venture funding, I had to think more about the long-term vision. VCs care a lot about what the company will look like in five or 10 years, and how it can be 10 or 100 times larger. That forced me to articulate the kind of company we were building and how it could be very large. But that wasn’t until a few years in.
What do you think drove the success of the company over the past decade?
Number one is an extreme focus on our customers. We’ve always said customers come first. We’ve listened to them, learned from them, tried to really understand their business and walk in their shoes. When I started, I spent countless hours with customers, going to listing appointments, seeing how their assistants used the MLS, sitting behind them and looking over their shoulders. That’s remained part of the culture we build.
Number two would be a really high bar for talent. We’ve found excellent people on the engineering side: strong technologists across a team of over 100 engineers, product managers and designers.
And then the third thing, which, at the time, was a little unusual: We started at the top of the market. A lot of companies that went after this space tried to go for the lower end or the mid-market, and going upmarket in our industry is really hard. We decided to go after the highest-producing agents and teams and go directly to agents, whereas many competitors try to sell to the brokerage first.
Direct-to-agent is harder initially, but you only succeed if agents are actually using the product and finding value, so it forced us to build a really good product. Even though it was hard at first, it ended up being a huge benefit. We now have 20,000 customers, many of whom are individual agents and teams, though we also serve brokerages.
About 30 percent of your customers are top-producing agents. Is the strategy going forward to continue pursuing those agents, or to broaden the base?
We’re certainly best known for serving top agents — it’s even in the name, Luxury Presence. But we have clients in markets all over the U.S. It’s not just high-end or luxury markets. We have customers in places where the average home price is $300,000. They come to us because they want to present themselves in a professional, sharp, aesthetically appealing way.
The reality is most agents want to operate at a higher price point, regardless of what market they’re in. Because we help agents do that, we’ve seen customers seek us out from all kinds of markets. We don’t exclude anyone.
What we do say is we tend to focus on full-time agents — people who are dedicated. If someone’s new to the industry, that’s okay; we can still work with them. But we like to work with people who are full-time.
You’ve called the new Presence platform the most significant product evolution in the company’s history. Was this a planned evolution, or did something happen in the market that pushed you to move faster?
Kramer: It was planned, and what enabled it was AI and how we’re using it internally. We can build a lot faster than we used to. We were able to take a one- or two-year roadmap and compress it into about nine months.
We’d also been hearing from many customers that they don’t want to use 10 different logins. They want fewer tools that do more. And we’ve always felt that one of the missing components of our platform was a CRM — that was the big release.
The goal was to bring everything customer-facing into one place: ads, social, SEO, website, emails, database engagement, all on one platform, all branded to the agent, easy to use.
It started with our customers, asking them what was missing, what they wanted to see. And that led us to identify three or four features we thought would be most valuable, and then move fast to build them.
You’ve grown your AI product and engineering teams significantly since the start of last year. Is it really just this new platform that’s justified that scale of investment?
It has. We’ve seen clear ROI from our AI investments — in the products we’ve built for customers and in the feedback and adoption we’re seeing. There’s clearly a desire and a real need in the market for those.
But also internally, our AI infrastructure, the operations team we’ve built, the AI engineers we’ve brought on, the heavy investment we’ve made in Claude in particular. We’re seeing ROI, which is why we keep spending.
We’re building three to four times faster and better than we did nine or 12 months ago. It’s easy for me to say, let’s keep making the investments, because it’s working.
What’s it like operating the company now compared to when you first started?
The job is very different. In the beginning, as a founder, you’re responsible for everything.
In the first year, I did customer service, onboarded clients, did sales, worked directly with engineers, designed the first version of the product. You do everything. Then over time, you hire yourself out of each job. You pick the thing you’re least good at and hate doing the most, find someone who’s really good at it, train them up and repeat until, finally, you have a whole leadership team.
Now my job is much less reactive than it used to be. Back then, every fire was [mine] to put out. Now my job is much more proactive and long-term. I’m not really thinking about what has to happen this week — my team handles most of that.
I’m thinking about what has to happen over the next six, 12, 24 months. A lot of strategic work, time with customers, board management and fundraising. We’re in the midst of a fundraising round right now.
And then managing the team, making sure they have clarity on where we’re going as a company: With 500-plus people, that’s almost a full-time job on its own. I’m the chief repetition officer — repeating where we’re going, holding standards high, communicating the vision. That’s really the most important thing now.
There’s a big debate in the industry about AI and how it’s going to impact real estate agents. Do you think it shrinks their role over time, expands it, or does it just split things between agents who use it and agents who get left behind?
AI will do some of the tasks that are currently done by real estate agents — or by the people agents hire, like assistants and transaction managers. But I don’t think it will ever do all of the work. I think the relational aspect of being a real estate agent becomes more valuable, not less.
I also don’t think the idea that an agent using AI suddenly becomes dramatically more competitive than one who isn’t is really true. The things that make a great real estate agent great are still going to matter a lot. If they use AI, they can free up time and get off the repetitive stuff, but I don’t think it fundamentally changes what it means to be a real estate agent.
I think as more things get automated and more transactional in everyday life, humans will crave human connection more. Think about teachers. Just because AI can teach kids well doesn’t mean we’re going to stop wanting human teachers. Same with therapists. Same with lawyers. And the same is true for real estate, for most consumers.
There’ll be some exceptions of people who like to figure things out on their own, and AI will be a tool for that. But I think that’ll be a minority.
So, I think the very best agents will be supercharged by AI. I don’t see it as the threat some people do. If you’ve worked with a great agent, more than half of what they do — there’s just no way AI could ever replicate that. Talking someone off the ledge at 11 p.m., making a dead deal happen — these things require so much nuance. It’s a very complex job.
You have an interesting backstory. You grew up in Germany, came to the U.S. on a basketball scholarship, got an MBA at Stanford. Out of all of those, which do you think shaped how you build and run a company more than people might expect?
I learned a lot about teamwork from being a basketball player — committing to a team and a big goal, delaying gratification, doing hard things in pursuit of something, finding joy in that process. So I got a lot about team building and leadership from basketball.
But the thing that inspired me most was those two years at Stanford Business School. I’m from a small town in Germany. I wasn’t surrounded by entrepreneurs growing up. People there tend to choose the safe path. There aren’t really examples of founders.
Coming to California, to Silicon Valley, being exposed to that environment — being around people with these very big ideas — I initially thought, you guys are all crazy to think you can build a huge company at 22.
But being around it changed my own thinking. I met more and more people who inspired me and helped me realize I wanted to be an entrepreneur and how to do it successfully.
The Silicon Valley way of thinking, that optimism — and then also the network, the investors and other founders who open doors — that had the biggest impact, I’d say.
